Politics. Sex. Science. Art. You know, the good stuff.

Stephanie Zvan is an analyst by trade, but she's paid not to talk about it. She is also the associate president of Minnesota Atheists and one of the hosts for their radio show and podcast, Atheists Talk. She speaks on science and skepticism in a number of venues, including science fiction and fantasy conventions.

Stephanie has been called a science blogger and a sex blogger, but if it means she has to choose just one thing to be or blog about, she's decided she's never going to grow up. In addition to science and sex and the science of sex, you'll find quite a bit of politics here, some economics, a regular short fiction feature, and the occasional bit of concentrated weird.

Oh, and arguments. She sometimes indulges in those as well. But I'm sure everything will be just fine. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

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EVENTS

The Case Against Female Self-Esteem, Part IV

I recently received an email from reader and occasional commenter captainahags titled “Please take this idiot apart!” The post in question is by Matt Forney, a self-published “entrepreneur” who seems to have taken bragging “pick-up artists” seriously when they said there was money in all those poor, lonely guys on the internet. So last year he started up a blog to test the idea that you can publish any old crap, call it “game”, and make money. He’s already put out a “best of” book.

The post in question is a perfect example of “any old crap”. It’s whiny, contradictory, and backed up by fuck all. But here. Rather that tell you about it, let’s show you what flies in PUA land–with commentary, because it wasn’t the post that sent captainahags to me as much as the fact that Forney doesn’t allow critical comments on his blog.

Friday’s post covered the long-winded, poorly asserted introduction to Forney’s post. Saturday’s covered the hilarious first of his “reasons”. “Reason” number 2 came yesterday. Today is Forney’s final chance to offer a reason that does something other than expose his own lack of education and insecurity.

Given that “urban” is code for “not white” and the good old CDC tells us white people use more antidepressants than anyone else, this isn’t starting well for Forney. Maybe he should stay away from linking those “intuition” pieces he likes so well. Also, 12% isn’t “average”, but maybe he’d know that if he placed any value on education.

I am fascinated, though, by the phrase “urban slut machine”. Is this a machine that produces sluts optimized for an urban environment? Are they Real Dolls that come in camo? Is this the name of Forney’s Spinal Tap cover band?

Or is this just a way for Forney to dehumanize women who will have sex but not with him?

Pharmacological assistance is the only way she can make it through her day without slitting her wrists, or alternately realizing that her life is a complete lie. Every day, women show through their actions that they despise their strong, independent lives.

Those actions that consist of 12% of them taking an antidepressant within a four-year period?

By the way, Forney doesn’t know this, so it’s probably worth mentioning here. There are “off-label” uses for antidepressants to treat phenomena that affect women more than men. I take a first-generation antidepressant, now rarely prescribed for depression, for migraines with insomnia. That doesn’t mean I’m depressed any more than the next option on the list my doctor and I drew up–an anti-convulsive–would mean I have epilepsy. Some menstrual and premenstrual symptoms are also helped by antidepressants. Our brains only use so many neurotransmitters. A drug that works on one brain function frequently has positive as well as negative side effects.

They want nothing more than for a man to throw them over his knee, shatter the Berlin Wall around their hearts, and expose the lovestruck, bashful little girl within.

I think Forney’s a bit confused as to where within a woman’s anatomy her heart is located. Really should have gotten some education, that one.

Game, at least as it was conceived by the seduction community, was all about this. All the hysterical nitwits blubbering about how “negging” and the like was designed to hurt girls’ self-esteem were precisely right, but that’s the thing; women are crying out for a man who will wound their self-esteem. “Confident” women are still women, and they still lust after men who dominate them, even if they can’t admit it to themselves. Because their self-esteem has been artificially boosted by society, today’s girls need extra-concentrated doses of dominance—i.e. game—in order to feel womanly, like a junkie chasing the dragon.

Negging isn’t about damaging a woman’s self-esteem. It’s about figuring out instantly whether a woman is going to put up with abusive behavior. Sadly, a good many of them are trained to, and the rest of us are under a lot of pressure to do the same. See: the internet shit storm that happens whenever a woman objects online to being subject to abuse. See also: Forney’s entire inability to respond except by liking other people’s tweets when I told him I didn’t care whether he found me fuckable then stopped engaging with him.

Oh, right. That’s another post. (Oh, is it ever.)

Recently, Noisey wrote about the explosion of retro sixties-style girl groups and solo singers in the indie rock scene, such as the Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls and Lana Del Rey. Feminism supposedly freed women to do whatever they wanted, yet indie girl musicians today—the kinds who started as garage bands and write/produce all their own songs—just want to wear their hair in beehives and pretend that they’re still sixteen years old.

Just like the swing revival meant we all wanted to live among gangsters in the Great Depression then get shipped off to go die fighting Nazis. And the way Kate Pierson’s beehive meant she was just looking for a good man. And the way this isn’t just one tiny trend among an indie scene that boasts Amanda Palmer, Claire Boucher, and a whole lot more.

Noisey and other mainstream writers try to spin this depressing reality by emphasizing that at least the girls are choosing to sing about boys. It’s not unlike how homeless winos keep “choosing” to pickle their livers with Wild Irish Rose. “I CAN QUIT ANYTIME I WANT TO!!!!!11″ Every song Best Coast has ever come up with is about boyfriends and smoking pot at the beach. Vivian Girls has a song about waiting for your boyfriend to call, a cliche that was old and moldy before Dennis Wilson bit the dust. Hell, Vivian Girls’ bassist Katy Goodman did an entire album with her side group La Sera that was about a breakup.

Good to know that most of my conversations are imaginary. All that talk at work, all that talk about writing, all that talk about research and ideas. Forney doesn’t have conversations like those, so he assumes people like me don’t either.

Feminists can claim that women don’t need men, but their actions put the lie to that; they need us far more than we need them. Girls will all but die without masculine attention.

Hell, I’m even starting to think that the feminist agita about “rape culture” is part of this as well. Pushing lies like the claim that one in three women will be raped during her lifetime and their constantly expanding the definition of rape are ways for feminists to indulge their desire for vulnerability in a way that doesn’t conflict with their view of themselves as “strong” and “empowered.”

Look, another unsourced claim. I wonder what that means.

Here’s a version of that 1 in 3. Note that what it says and what Forney says are not the same. The claim is “It is estimated that 1 in 3 American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.” Sexual assault includes nonconsensual groping and that asshole who tries to rub himself on you on the dance floor, not just rape. Even if Forney doesn’t know better, the asshole who fled after I turned around and yelled at him to leave me alone sure knew he was doing something wrong.

As for that link, it’s to another post of Forney’s saying that roofies are a myth. One of the reasons he gives is that no one would ever let a man assist a clearly impaired women out of a space they were responsible for, like a party or a bar. Because, you know, everyone always steps in to say, “Look, she got dangerously drunk on our watch. Let us keep her here and stick around in case anything goes wrong.”

At the end of the day, there are no Strong, Independent Women™. There are only shrews pleading for a taming.

Oh, so that bit at the beginning where Forney says he loves insecure women–that’s a meaningless statement because the other kind of woman doesn’t actually exist? Or maybe Forney’s having a bit of a go at The Secret.

All the posturing, the pill-popping, the whining and demands for “equality”; they’re a cry for help. Girls don’t want the six-figure cubicle job, the shiny Brooklyn 2BR, the master’s degree, the sexual liberation, none of it.

Someone has watched too much Sex in the City. You see, there is no drama in a dramedy without dissatisfaction. But just like very few of us actually make six figures and relatively few of us live in New York, we don’t actually spend our time whining about sex. It’s a script. You know, like in “the game”. Those guys are actually that impressive. Young women today aren’t actually that dissatisfied.

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How does he explain depression among men? There’s a rather solid point that women are just more often to seek out medical help, whether it’s about depression or about any other condition.

The other thing is, this guy is generalizing from a handful of anecdotes and some pop culture. All this proves is that he probably doesn’t know any women, can’t look at statistics, and isn’t looking very far for female musicians.

On women needing men more than men need women, if that’s true, then why are there all these PUA and whiny guys going on and on about how women won’t go out with them and they are Real Nice Guys (TM)? It seems like the opposite tends to be true (not totally sure) but I keep getting noise about how horrible it is that women are so indifferent to men.

As for that link, it’s to another post of Forney’s saying that roofies are a myth. One of the reasons he gives is that no one would ever let a man assist a clearly impaired women out of a space they were responsible for, like a party or a bar.

Well, it’s an objective fact that Rohypnol exists and works. As does Ambien. For that matter, chloral hydrate has been known to be a “knockout drug” since the 1920s.

I was at a conference in Ireland with a friend, who was lured up to another guest’s room with promises that he had some truly fantastic scotch. She tried it. And when she started to feel disoriented and unable to see straight, she left and came back to our room. She was so messed up by whatever it was she’d been slipped that she couldn’t even speak coherently and passed out – which saved some Irish skank a severe beating, because I wasn’t able to learn what had happened until she came to, in the middle of the next afternoon. (This is a young lady who can demolish a tremendous amount of hard liquor; there is no such thing as a mere shot of scotch that will fell her like that!)

Not that it really matters, but I don’t think “urban” is supposed to be code for non-white here. I think he’s trying to evoke the (imaginary) dichotomy between chaste, traditional, family-oriented women living in rural areas and educated, ambitious, selfish, promiscuous women who live in cities. I doubt he cares much about minority women, honestly. His target is the women on the television show “Sex and the City” and the supposed legion of college-educated white women who have moved to NYC, LA, etc. to try to emulate that lifestyle. This is a common theme among those preoccupied with female sexuality.

Ugh, I hate the whole misogynistic vein of The Game all the way back to it’s roots in the systemic infantalization of women. They’re just pissed they can’t call us mentally ill and lock us up for having opinions in the US right now.

This guy needs help. Real, honest-to-whatever, psychiatric help. Nobody should be this delusional and running around loose.

Asshole and mentally ill are not synonyms.

Also, people who are significantly more delusional are “running around loose” because they’re grown fucking adults who haven’t broke the law and are functional enough to survive, and it is actually illegal to lock them up for the rest of their lives. This is a good thing, because there is a long history of men calling their wives mentally ill and locking them up for the rest of their lives, so we might want to keep this advance in morality.

Surely it’s a modest triumph that a guy like this has actually heard of the Bechdel Test? Even if there’s no evidence he understands what it is. After all, that might be beyond his his intellectual capacities.

In the course of reading all 4 parts in one sitting, I found myself laughing so hard at this guy that I nearly pissed my pants. It’s like the equivalent of the ancient astronaut belief-space as applied to women.

All of Forney’s post is nonsense, but in this part, I find it especially heinous that he attributes mental illness to a desire for women to be subjugated. I hate how sexist gender roles are prescribed as the solution to any problem women may be facing, especially considering how those same sexist gender roles have contributed to a great deal of harm to a lot of people, and especially considering how difficult it is for people to get their experiences with mental illness taken seriously. He is also ignorant about history and healthcare. He’s using the percentage of people on certain drugs as an argument, but not taking into account when various illnesses were first discovered, when various drugs were discovered, and changing attitudes about mental illness (i.e. you can’t use “people didn’t take these drugs way back when” as an argument if we knew less about the illnesses back then, if the drugs didn’t exist back then, if there was/is a stigma attached to having certain illnesses/being on certain drugs).

And can the use of psychiatric medications really mean that women are dissatisfied with increased autonomy? I can cite no less an authority than The Rolling Stones song Mother’s Little Helper that the prescription of anti-anxiety medication was a way that women were being oppressed in an era of eroding patriarchy. Valium was a man’s drug being used to keep women from joining the fight.

And I think the so called Men’s Rights movement’s more extreme elements actually think that women need men LESS than men need women, and that being among the MGTOW faction and working on some kind of sexbot solution is is the ultimate way to reduce this power advantage women have over men. At least that the picture I get when I can stand reading the Man Boobz site.

It would be cool if there were a sane men’s rights movement. But wait, there is, it’s pretty much mainstream politically oriented feminism.

I’m a woman who writes my own songs (not professionally or anything) and a grand total of 0 are related to the issue of a man. I tend to write songs about politics and stuff that said Forney here would probably take my sarcastic songs about the evil plots of the gays and the Reds seriously.

I really shouldn’t laugh so hard at someone so pathetic and so filled with self-loathing. But I really couldn’t help myself. And Urban Slut Machine is an awesome band name. They can open for Pussy Riot (when the latter get out of jail).
@ Deoridhe #6 – well said!